and half-heartedness were alike unintelligible to Milton.
He fell upon the Presbyterians when they showed a disposition to palter
with the logical consequences of their own action, and scourged them
unmercifully. They had "banded and borne arms against their king,
divested him, disanointed him, nay, cursed him all over in their pulpits,
and their pamphlets." But when once the king was brought to trial, then
"he who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God
and saints, laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms,
and so to be fought against, is now, though nothing penitent or altered
from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the
Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned." He
prepares for them a similar dilemma, between the horns of which they have
since been content to dwell, in his treatment of the question of divorce:
"They dare not affirm that marriage is either a sacrament or a mystery
... and yet they invest it with such an awful sanctity, and give it such
adamantine chains to bind with, as if it were to be worshipped like some
Indian deity, when it can confer no blessing upon us, but works more and
more to our misery."

Milton's astonishment and indignation in cases like these are a
convincing evidence of his inability to understand average politics, and
that world of convenience, precaution, and compromise which is their
native place. His own tenacity and constancy have something grim about
them. Andrew Marvell, in his tract called _The Rehearsal Transposed_,
speaking of the intolerance of his adversary, Samuel Parker, says: "If
you have a mind to die, or to be of his party (there are but these two
conditions), you may perhaps be rendered capable of his charity." Neither
of these two conditions was a certain title to the charity of Milton. In
the _Eikonoklastes_ he pursues the dead king with jibe and taunt, and
exults over the smallest advantage gained. The opening words of the tract
show him conscious of the difficulty and delicacy of the part he acted in
making war on one who had "paid his final debt to nature and his faults."
But what then? If the king, being dead, could speak, the dead king must
be answered, and his gauntlet taken up "in the behalf of liberty and the
commonwealth."

The manner in which he conducts this and other controversies has brought
upon Milton's head universal reproach. He is intemperate and violent,